ig·no·ra·mus
by two teaspoons
Summary: It was a voice that was always there, a whisper of the wind that never went unheard. It bothered her how often she didn't listen to the voice, even as it screamed at her to do something. It was especially annoying when people she had never even met before suddenly seemed so familiar. ––Neurotic, uncaring SELF-INSERT.


**Summary: **It was a voice that was always there, a whisper of the wind that never went unheard. It bothered her how often she didn't listen to the voice, even as it screamed at her to do something. It was especially annoying when people she had never even met before suddenly seemed so familiar. -Neurotic, uncaring SELF-INSERT.

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**chapter one**

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No one ever seemed to believe her when she said she could remember the moment of her birth and even beyond that.

They said that she couldn't have possibly remembered anything before that - because anything before conception was simply nothing, an abysmal status of nonexistence.

After some thinking, Ikehara Suzume bitterly decided that it seemed fitting that her past life was full of nothing, kept alive by only the slightest of intuition.

So she sat there in a prison cell of Konohagakure - alone, cold, and charged with political treason.

.

.

.

_"Maybe it's like a third sense or something."_

_She looked at her teammate strangely. "You mean sixth sense? Like ESP?" She shuddered at the very idea._

**. . . **

The wise always claimed that the creation of life was a beautiful process, but the wisest knew that it was nothing short of bloody, traumatizing, and unnecessarily sticky.

It was really no wonder that the average person typically did not remember anything before the age of three.

But Suzume was no average person, and this was no average story.

Her first memory of this life was coming out, vision foggy and disoriented, as she felt gentle, gloved hands resting on the small of her back, bringing her closer to who she later learned to be her mother.

_It was easy to remember the first memory_, she later testified,_ just as how it was always easy to remember a first friend, a first pet, or a first love._ On the other hand, the next succession of months up to when her vision later cleared up seemed like just one murky, prolonged daydream – and she decided that it was undeserving of being called her second memory, so it wasn't.

Her second memory was vague, but she remembered it all the same, and it was when a toddler had reached deep into the confines of Suzume's flowery crib and tapped on her squishy arm.

"Hi, Suzu-chan," the girl chirped cheerfully, "I'm Chihiro, your big sister!"

Suzume gaped at her from beyond the soft polka dot blankets she laid in as the girl introduced herself quickly and without a stumble.

Chihiro stood, waiting for a garble or a smile from the infant, but Suzume only wailed in confusion, because a nagging voice in the back of her head screamed at her that she was an only child.

It was only after the flustered toddler ran out of the room, panicking and screaming for the rest of the family to come inside, that Suzume discovered she in fact had four older siblings.

She cried even louder.

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.

.

_"I always hear these voices in my head, Shizune-san."_

**. . .**

She was two when she blabbed her first discernible word, witnessed specially by her eight-year-old brother.

Unlike Chihiro, who was her elder by four years, Kenta was older than Suzume by six, and he was one of two older brothers.

"What is this, Suzu-chan?" Her brother asked, his warm hands grasping the sleeves of Suzume's pajamas so gently, as though he could shatter her with just the slightest force. She ignored the stickiness of his fingers, because his favorite snack was jam, and she had not the heart to tell him to wash his hands.

He wouldn't have understood her string of babbles anyhow.

Kenta held up a puppet of a dog, brushing it enthusiastically against Suzume's cheek as he encouraged his little sister to answer, letting out a soft, comedic bark. "Ruff, ruff!"

Suzume opened her mouth hesitantly, the movements of her tongue seemingly foreign as he gestured for her to continue, "... _dog._"

"_Daw..ugh_?" Kenta, confused, brought the puppet's dancing to a stop. "What is a _dawugh?_ This is an **inu**, Suzu-chan. Can you say **inu**?"

Suzume let out a gargled cackle. "No!" She grabbed at the puppet with her small hands and threw it at her brother's nose.

"Oh no. She's at that stubborn age. I better tell Mama." The boy muttered to himself, catching the toy as it slid down his face and into his lap. He got up from his seat so quickly that he nearly fell over Suzume's nearby crib, making a swift exit into the next room, where their mother laid resting.

Suzume stared at the open door, waiting for her brother's return.

"**Inu**," she whispered, after he had already left the room.

Her family later tried to pretend that 'dog' was her first word, but Suzume knew better.

Everyone knew that her first word had been 'no', and that in itself should have been a precursor for trouble.

.

.

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_"I'm sure it's just an aftermath of the enemy's genjutsu, Suzume-chan." _

**. . .**

"Do I have to be a ninja?"

Suzume had asked the big question suddenly and in the middle of a family dinner, lowering her spoon of soup from her mouth to speak loudly as she carelessly splashed around the homemade onion soup. Chihiro, without missing a beat, wiped at the soup stain on the cotton tablecloth.

Her father was the first to break the silence, coughing violently as he noisily pounded on his struggling windpipe. Her mother, who sat nonchalantly on the other side of him, pat his back dispassionately, as if choking on a baby back rib was normal occurrence for the family.

After he recovered from his earlier ordeal, he gruffly readdressed his youngest daughter. "There's this genin that my colleague works with - the kid has no arms. And he STILL wants to be a ninja. What excuse do you have?"

Hideki, who was the eldest brother, fourteen, and a chūnin at the time, spoke up. "What does having no arms got to do with anything?" He turned to look at the rest of his younger siblings, and Nanako, the second eldest sibling, shrugged. She had only just become a genin at the age of twelve, so her opinion about being a valued ninja had not yet been set in stone.

"EVERYTHING, KID," Her father's voice boomed across the table; he was a renowned, specialized ninja (_tokubetsu jōnin_, a murmur whispered in Suzume's ear, and the five-year-old mindlessly swatted the air around her head). "Suzume, you're entering in the academy next year, and that is final. Any words, Akane?" He looked at his wife for affirmation, and his question sounded more like a statement than anything else.

"You know," her mother hummed in amusement as she eyed her husband, "there's a family that just moved in next door, Keisuke. They have a daughter around Suzu-chan's age, who is planning on enrolling in the civilian academy down the street." Suzume could already see the gears running in her maternal figure's head, schemes and plans running amok. The five-year-old groaned.

"Oh!" Chihiro pitched in. "We could set up a play date for them! Maybe Suzume can take this chance to figure out if being a boring civilian is really what she wants."

"Thanks, sis," Suzume looked at her disdainfully. For a nine-year-old, Chihiro tended to be really pushy.

"What?!" Her older sister bellowed. "It's true! Being a civilian is Boooring with a capital B."

Hideki, who sat smirking in the seat across from the two, snarkily remarked, "Do you even know how to spell 'boring', idiot Chihiro?"

"Ask that again, you butt! I dare you!"

The two began to fight, and everyone else at the table grew quiet and disinterested, for arguments between the arrogant Hideki and the happy-go-lucky Chihiro were normal occurrence - normal occurrence like their dad choking on baby back ribs or their mother cooking foul-smelling onion soup.

As it turned out, Suzume's mother had never exactly shot down Chihiro's idea of setting up a play date between her youngest daughter and the next-door-neighbor's daughter, and the next week, the five-year-old dismally found herself in front of a sniffling, trembling new playmate.

The two mothers, who quickly exchanged introductions, took it to themselves to have their own outing in the village's monthly flea market, and Nanako, whose genin team was currently taking a break from pulling weeds and mowing lawns, was left to watch the children on her own.

"Why aren't you going to the ninja academy next year?" Suzume asked curiously, as the two played together under the blazing sun in the Ikehara household's backyard.

The other girl, who was wheezing, moved her attention away from the careful braid she had made in Suzume's dark, burgundy hair. "I have trouble breathing," she explained softly, looking off to the side in embarrassment, "like, there's a problem with my lungs."

"So?" The other girl folded her arms, lifting an eyebrow at her friend in disbelief. "There's a guy with no arms, running around and being a ninja!"

Saya, as Suzume later learned her name to be, looked bewildered. "How does he make hand seals without arms?"

"Dunno, but he manages," Suzume shrugged. "Or so my dad says. I'm sure he's somewhere out in the village, kicking ass."

The blonde toddler gasped. "You said a no-no word!"

Suzume jumped to cover the girl's mouth, shushing her as she turned back to watch her older sister, who was leaning against the side of the fence in a daydream. The last thing she needed was another hour-long lecture from Nanako, whose main hobby was being a complete stick-in-the-mud.

Even as Saya yelled a muffled "mh avin ah pahnee ack," Suzume kept her chubby hand against the girl's face.

That day, she learned the meaning of several new grown-up words: 'panic attack', 'endangerment to others', and 'banned from ever speaking to my daughter Saya again'.

**.**

**.**

**.**

_"No, you don't understand, Shizune-san. It's been like this since I was born, but the voices just keep getting worse."_

**_. . ._**

The boy, whose shoulder squished against hers in the tight hallway of the Hokage's office, cast a seemingly innocent glance at her and for a moment, it almost seemed believable if not for the very fact that just a few moments ago, he had been the one to drop onto her over a dozen waterballoons filled with acrylic paint.

"Sorry," the blonde fool confessed sheepishly. "I didn't think anyone would be hanging out at the Hokage Monument this time of day! I just wanted to decorate it a little more, if ya know what I mean, heh."

_'Uzumaki Naruto,' _the timid voice at the back of her head murmured his name with the strangest familiarity, as it always did when she met somebody she swore she hadn't seen before.

"It's noon," Suzume deadpanned, as her tiny juvenile fingers ran through the tangled mess that was her hair. The bigger surprise was that there weren't more people spending their free time at what was considered the best view of the village.

He just continued to laugh - nervously, Suzume noticed.

She felt a twinge of pity and guilt gnawing deep at her gut, compelled to apologize for something she hadn't done. She was sure she hadn't met this boy before, but she felt as though they'd been close friends.

Even as Iruka-sensei began to roughly drag him away, the six-year-old boy looked back at her, an apologetic, whiskered grin barely visible from the back of the chūnin instructor's broad shoulders.

But all that Suzume could even think about was how upset her mother was going to be when she got home.

She frowned.

**_._**

**_._**

**_._**

_"I think I'm going insane, Shizune-san."_

**. . .**

"How was your first day at the ninja academy, little sis?" Hideki asked from his seat on the floor, leaning against a sofa cushion as he flipped through the folds of the weekly newspaper.

"A complete disaster."

It wasn't often that the newly-promoted jōnin boy had a break from missions, and he always made sure to indulge in those rarities thoroughly. As he looked at the distress written all over his sister's face, however, he duly decided that his crossword puzzle would have to wait.

Nanako, who was sharpening her prized kunai blades on the oak wood coffee table, cast a sympathetic glance at the grimacing academy student. "How so? And what happened to your hair?"

"I met some punk named Naruto, that's what happened."

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**Author's note:** My first attempt at a real self-insert, oops :(


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